Labour’s astonishing case of memory loss
From the economy to benefits, house-building to health care, Labour tries to pretend that it has been out of office for a generation
To listen yesterday to Andy Burnham, Labour’s health spokesman, defending the GP contract signed by the last government was to have one’s credulity stretched to breaking point. Mr Burnham rejected the accusation levelled by Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, that “Labour did terrible damage to out-of-hours care”. This cannot be so, said Mr Burnham, because the British Medical Association said the 2004 contract was a good deal. Indeed it was – for its members.
We have often said that, where the debate over the NHS is concerned, there is entirely too much political mudslinging. But Labour simply cannot be allowed to peddle the outright lie that the problems people have in getting access to GPs at evenings and weekends have nothing to do with the way their contract allowed doctors to shed such responsibilities – or, more broadly, to lay every problem with a health service they ran for 13 years at the door of the Coalition.
This is not so much opportunism as outright amnesia. There has been much amusement in Westminster this week over the fact that both Labour and the Tories have deleted inconvenient material, predating the last general election, from their websites. Yet in the case of the Opposition, it is part of a much wider attempt to treat 2010 as though it was Year Zero. On the economy, health, welfare, education and a score of other issues, they imagine voters will forget that this is not just the party that is responsible for so many of the country’s problems, but in many instances the very personnel.
The best example comes in the field of energy. In recent weeks, Ed Miliband has tried to make political capital out of rising electricity and gas bills – blithely ignoring the fact that he was in charge of the sector until April 2010. He now wants to cap prices, reform the market and split suppliers from generators, all of which he could have done while in office. The one thing he is not prepared to suggest – which has been a direct cause of higher prices – is abandoning the green levies that he himself imposed.
The memory loss goes beyond Mr Miliband. Jack Straw, the former home secretary, this week said the party made “a spectacular mistake” in allowing nearly a million Eastern Europeans to come here to work. Ministers here lifted controls on the movement of labour years before other major EU economies – so what did they think was going to happen? Mr Straw, moreover, would have us believe it was just an honest error. Perhaps – but some would argue that it was part of a deliberate policy to bring in cheap workers and tilt the nation’s demography, in the hope that Labour might benefit politically.
Another Labour veteran, David Blunkett, has criticised the way in which Roma settlers in his Sheffield constituency have angered local people. “We have got to be tough and robust in saying to these people: 'You are not living in a downtrodden village or woodlands’,” he said. Had a Tory made such provocative comments, the uproar would have been deafening. Yet Labour politicians appear to have a special dispensation to denounce the impact of their own policies.
One of the week’s other themes has been the reversal of post-war social mobility. The damage was done under both Labour and Tory governments – but nothing was done to address it after 1997, with educational failure becoming entrenched in all too many schools. On welfare, similarly, shadow cabinet members now bemoan the culture of dependency fostered by Gordon Brown. In the diplomatic field, the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, has been busily denouncing the Government’s failure to boycott a Commonwealth conference in Sri Lanka that his own party committed not just the Prime Minister but also the Prince of Wales to attending.
From the economy to benefits, house-building to health care, Labour tries to pretend that it has been out of office for a generation rather than three years. The Conservatives are not blameless: as the surgery to their website shows, they would dearly like to forget how eagerly they signed up to Labour’s destructive spending and energy plans. But they, at least, have admitted the error of their ways. For Labour, the process of atonement has not even begun.
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and a bunch of robbing self-serving hypocrites.
Originally Posted by Win2Win
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